Component Interaction Map

Runtime components are easier to understand when viewed as relationships rather than isolated products.

Core Interaction Patterns

Network and exposure

• MetalLB supports external service exposure in self-managed environments.
• NGINX and APISIX expose and route user-facing traffic.
• External DNS publishes hostnames for ingress and service endpoints.
• cert-manager secures those endpoints with managed certificates.

Access and security

• Keycloak provides identity for multiple Runtime UIs and APIs.
• OpenFGA adds fine-grained authorization where simple role-based access is not enough.
• OpenBao manages secrets and identity-bound access to sensitive values.
• APISIX integrates with Keycloak for API-facing access control.

Execution and state

• KubeAI orchestrates inference-serving workloads.
• vLLM and FasterWhisper provide inference engines used within that serving layer.
• Temporal and Argo Events handle workflow execution and event-based automation.
• PostgreSQL stores structured operational state.
• MinIO stores object-style data and shared artifacts.

Observability

• Prometheus collects metrics from Runtime services.
• Grafana Alloy forwards telemetry signals.
• Loki stores logs.
• Tempo stores traces.
• Grafana brings these signals together into dashboards and operational views.

Delivery

• GitLab produces versioned source and CI outputs.
• Harbor stores images and artifacts.
• Argo CD deploys the desired state into the cluster.

Important Examples

Some interactions are especially important in practice:

• PgAdmin -> PostgreSQL PgAdmin exists to operate PostgreSQL more easily.
• Grafana -> Prometheus, Loki, Tempo Grafana is the common interface for metrics, logs, and traces.
• MinIO -> Argo Events, Argo Workflows, Tempo, KubeAI MinIO provides storage and credentials to several Runtime and higher-layer consumers.
• Argo CD -> all platform components Argo CD is the main GitOps deployment engine across the stack.
• GitLab and Harbor -> Argo CD GitLab and Harbor are upstream prerequisites because manifests, charts, and images must exist before Argo CD can deploy them.

Where To Go Next

For component-level details, use the Runtime components section. This page is intended as a summary of the main interaction model rather than an exhaustive dependency graph.